How Well Do You Know Your Target?
September 25, 2020
Chris Rock recently described his relationship with his audience as a private love affair that outsiders were not meant to understand. Brand voices and their targeted future customers form a similar bond. If the message makes sense, then the message was made for you. Developing and maintaining authentic connections between brands and target audiences begins with a strong command of translating strategy into the target persona’s love language, so to speak.
Social media audience research has a direct impact on the specificity and reach of the target message. The deeper the study, the more opportunity to hone the brand identity and ensure influence. Almost everyone needs guidance to be a more effective communicator. Read on for strategies to be seen, heard, and dominate your target group.
Get to Know Who Knows You
When compiling data, start simple. Brands of all sizes can benefit from this strategy:
Step one, study the profile of your existing following. Demographic segmentation is an age-old go-to for marketers. Demographic segmentation pinpoints general audience profiles like age, ethnicity, and income.
Step two, balance your study with understanding the psychographics of your community because people within identical demographic profiles can behave in drastically varied ways. Suss out more refined subtleties within the target audience with psychographics. Psychographics hone in on the shadings of the abstract qualities such as sensitivities, concerns, and tastes.
Step three, schedule regular evaluations of your target audience. Like fashion, data can be informal or formal. Brand managers don’t always have to spend time and money on formal qualitative and quantitative research to gain insight. A regular cycle of social media analysis is a casual way to identify the points of connection that forge your following. Without regular check-ins, you are bound to lose connection with your consumer.
Discover details about your demographic and investigate the psychographics that drive purchase of your brand to sharpen your focus. Psychographic investigations allow for specialization of your brand’s vibe and message and establish optimal odds for marketing success. Demographics are a strong predictor of the audience in the center of your bullseye. However, psychographic segmentation offers more leveraging power when developing a brand voice heard by precisely the right audience. Now engaging with your target audience is standardized and reliable as a measure for increasing profitability. The takeaway: make the time to put yourself in your consumer’s shoes. Empathy is a powerful tool to guide design and marketing decisions.